What if she found out that that she’d raised the kind of girl who “necked and petted and flew to New York,” whose “pants were wet with the sticky white filth of desire”? “She’s not my daughter,” Plath ...

“A mental pentathlete.” That’s how Joyelle McSweeney describes the genre-defying Canadian writer Anne Carson—the winner of ...

In 1987 the First Intifada broke out after an Israeli truck in the northern part of the Gaza Strip struck and killed four Palestinians in what Israelis described as an accident, but many Palestinians ...

We judge our enemies by their actions and our allies by their intentions. The moral lapses of our enemies: hypocrisies. The moral lapses of our allies: errors. Their compromises: stupid, probably evil ...

Climate politics are in a very weird place right now. On the one hand, current events would seem to be fertile ground—perhaps more fertile than ever—for generating popular support for climate action.

In late 2024, the world watched with a mix of hope and disbelief as opposition forces in Syria finally toppled Bashar al-Assad, ending more than fifty years of rule by the Assad family. Images of ...

When Plato was an infant, bees alighted on his lips and, nestling there, set about making honey. His parents had placed him, sleeping, on the summit of a mountain while they paid tribute to the gods, ...

The Democratic Party is in crisis, and it goes far beyond the stereotypical “Dems in Disarray” headlines. The party’s popularity numbers are abysmal: a March poll by NBC News found that only 27 ...

In an image shared around the world, Elon Musk is seen grunting while waving a chainsaw over his head at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington in February. Perhaps less ...

Sixty years ago, Life photographer John Dominis traveled to eastern Kentucky, where he captured shocking and raw photographs of deprivation—the target of President Lyndon Johnson’s recently announced ...

“For me all that took place in Vietnam was inseparable from Hiroshima,” wrote the American psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton in his 2011 memoir, Witness to an Extreme Century. He was referring to the ...

In 1980 Frances Gabe applied for a patent for a self-cleaning house. The design was based on her own home, which she had worked on for more than a decade. Each room had a sprinkler system installed; ...